Church of England

The Church of the England dates from the Reeormation of the 16th century, but its theology has come to represent a via media between Catholicism and Protestantism.

When Martin Luther tacked his 95 theses onto the door of his church in Wittenberg in 1517, he began a theological revolution within Christianity, but he provoked the anger of England’s King Henry VIII. Henry wrote a treatise sharply critical of Luther and his scriptural emphasis. Entitled Assertio Septum Sacramentorum, Henry’s tract included vivid vitriol aimed at Luther for the German’s condemnation of the pope. Henry called Luther “the most venomous serpent who had ever crept into the church.” The English king’s loyalty to Rome in the early days of the Reformation earned him the title “Defender of the Faith.”

Circumstances changed for Henry and Rome by 1530. Henry wanted to divorce his wife, Catherine of Aragon, in favor of the courtier Anne Boleyn. Catherine had not provided Henry with a male heir to the throne. Henry and his chancellor, Thomas Wolsey, a cardinal of the Roman Church and papal legate in England, petitioned the pope for an annulment of the marriage. But the Vatican refused, largely because of the presence in Rome of Catherine’s nephew, CHARLES V, and the soldiers of the Holy Roman Empire. Wolsey never recovered from his failure to secure the annulment.

Infuriated by the pope’s refusal, Henry pushed for an English solution to his predicament. His inner circle contended that the English had long been hostile to the papacy and that since medieval times the church in England had questioned the authority of the pope’s jurisdiction over it. By Henry’s time it had become possible for the king to convince the English episcopacy and the faithful that he had the right to rule in secular and religious affairs. Eventually he initiated a series of steps that severed the church in England from the church in Rome and established the English monarch at the head of the then-independent Church of England.

The English cleric Thomas Cranmer was essential to the process of separation from Rome and establishment of the new Church of England. Sir Thomas More

Had succeeded Wolsey as chancellor. More was an ardent and pious Catholic and refused to participate in the king’s matrimonial chicanery. As a result, More was executed and later made a saint of the Roman Church. Cranmer became archbishop of Canterbury and Henry’s most trusted adviser. He initiated legislation in PARLIAMENT that attempted to create and define the Church of England, a legislative process that stretched over the next half century.

The most significant of the early acts of state orchestrated by Cranmer was the Act in Restraint of Appeals in 1533. This act’s preamble created the split with the Roman Church. It declared that England was at that moment, and always had been, a sovereign empire. The spiritual component of that sovereignty was the English Church. Thus, as one part of that empire, the church had the right to govern itself. Further, ecclesiastical complaints could no longer be appealed to Rome; they had to go through Henry.

The Ten Articles of Faith defined by the Church of England’s fathers during the 1536 Convocation, intended to define the new church’s theology, established doctrine and ritual remarkably similar to the Roman Church’s. But the acts reduced the number of sacraments that bishops deemed necessary for salvation from seven to three (baptism, penance, and the Eucharist), and they wrote the article about the Eucharist so as to allow for both Roman and Lutheran interpretation.

Such ambiguity reflected Henry’s own doubts. Privately, he continued to practice his faith in orthodox Roman fashion, insisting upon crosses, altars, vestments, and the sacrament of the Eucharist that included tran-substantiation. Publicly he worked for the independence of the Church of England, promoting the new doctrines accordingly.

Monasteries provided the primary centers of opposition to Henry’s publicly reforming acts. The monks owned approximately 7 million acres of land in England, a fact that raised more than a few eyebrows among the reformers. Henry assigned the archdeacon of Buckingham and others to visit the monasteries, account for their behavior, inventory their wealth, and report back. Although some scholars have deemed these reports specious, the results revealed enormous corruption in the monasteries and massive irregularities in worship. Henry used this information to confiscate their property. In the process he gained great wealth for the Crown. He also expelled many monks and nuns from England in 1536. Following the dissolution Henry’s government in 1539 issued the Act of the Six Articles. The act allowed the priests, monks, and nuns who remained in England to marry, and it eliminated the sacrament of confession from English ecclesiology. The dissolution of the monasteries and the Act of Six Articles proved important steps in the transformation of the English Church. They guaranteed that Catholicism would have difficulty reestablishing jurisdiction in England, no matter what might happen theologically.

The promulgation of the Book of Common Prayer was the last among the Church of England’s founding legislative activities. Created by Cranmer and issued in 1549, the text provided the church with a liturgy so important to Cranmer and the king that it became a criminal offense to use any other in England. The Book of Common Prayer, based on the rites and sacraments of the Roman Church but incorporating elements of theology made popular by the Reformation, gave to the church a coherent theology, although traditional minded clerics and laymen often practiced the older rites of the ancient church.

Over time the Church of England evolved in the face of serious challenges. In the early 1550s King Edward VI, Henry VIII’s son by Jane Seymour, working with some of his Protestant relatives, reworked elements of the church’s practices. Their efforts led to the promulgation of a second prayer book, and priests were no longer able to wear ornate vestments. Through such moves the Church of England moved ever further away from Catholicism.

When Edward died in 1553, Queen Mary I, the daughter of Catherine of Aragon (Henry VIII’s first wife) ascended to the throne of England. A devout and public Catholic, Mary attempted to reestablish Catholicism in England by returning England to the pope. She packed the Parliament with her supporters and had them repeal every ecclesiastical act that her predecessors had promulgated. Married clergy disappeared, as did the Book of Common Prayer. Even vernacular Bibles were outlawed. Mary revived heresy laws and burned 300 people at the stake, earning her the title of “Bloody Mary.” The executions horrified people throughout England, and the death of the queen in 1558 signaled the end to any serious efforts to repudiate the English Reformation.

In the aftermath of Mary’s attempt to wed the English church to Rome, Queen Elizabeth I recognized that she needed to end any lingering doctrinal confusion. Despite the fact that she was personally torn between tradition and reform, she encouraged Parliament to pass acts that became known as the Elizabeth Settlement. These acts made Elizabeth supreme governor of the church, a phrase in contrast to her father’s title of supreme head of the church. This was an attempt to appease radical Protestants who had gained power during Edward’s reign. A third prayer book was issued based on Edward’s second one, rather than the original. The new book included 39 Articles of Religion that would came to define religious policy in England for centuries. The Act of Supremacy and Uniformity of 1559 demanded that clergy adhere to the Elizabethan acts and to Elizabeth’s role as the church’s governor. Although Elizabeth’s actions did not enthrall everyone in England—some traditionalists wanted to return to

Catholic ways, while others had adopted ideas promulgated by radical continental theologians and became dissidents known as Puritans—the Church of England remained the dominant religious institution in the realm.

After Elizabeth’s death in 1603, the Church of England struggled for decades with its ecclesiology, theology, and finances. The Jacobean kings continued reforms, including the creation and publication of the King James version of the Bible.

Further reading: G. R. Balleine and Colliss Davies, A Fopular History of the Church of England (London: Vine Books, 1976); Andrew Foster, The Church of England, 1570-1640 (London: Longman, 1994); Sheridan Gilley and W. J. Sheils, eds., A History Religion in Britain: Practice and Belief from Pre-Roman Times to the Present (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Aidan Nicholos, The Panther and the Hind: A Theological History of Anglicanism (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993).

—David P Dewar

Cieza de Leon, Pedro (1520-1560) Spanish conquistador and chronicler of the conquest of Peru A Spaniard who traveled to Peru after the conquest, Pedro Cieza de Leon wrote a detailed account of the people and placed he observed.

Cieza de Leon traveled to South America in 1535, when he was only 15 years old. He arrived as the Spanish consolidated the territory after Francisco Pizarro’s defeat of the Inca emperor Atahualpa. Six years later he began writing his travel narrative, which he finished in 1552. He was then, as he wrote, “thirty-two years old, having spent seventeen of them in these Indies.” Modern scholars believe that Cieza de Leon produced one of the most accurate travel accounts of the age of discovery.

Cieza de Leon’s approach to what he saw can be understood by reading his text, which exists in at least two modern English translations. Originally printed in Seville in 1553, the book immediately caught the attention of other printers. Within 20 years publishers in Rome, Antwerp, and Venice had each issued editions of it.

Many travelers praised the places they saw, but few did so with what seems like the kind of open mind that Cieza de Leon possessed. Consider his views of Cuzco. “Nowhere in this kingdom of Peru was there a city with the air of nobility that Cuzco possessed, which (as I have said repeatedly) was the capital of the empire of the Incas and their royal seat,” he wrote. “Compared with it, the other provinces of the Indies are mere settlements. And such towns as there are lack design, order, or polity to commend them, whereas Cuzco had distinction to a degree, so those who founded it must have been people of great worth.” He stood in awe when he looked at the city’s streets and especially its finest residences, which were “made all of stone so skillfully joined that it was evident how old the edifices were, for the huge stones were very well set.” The city also had the “temple to the sun, which they called Curicancha [golden enclosure], which was among the richest in gold and silver to be found anywhere in the world.”

But it was more than buildings that Cieza de Leon praised. He was also fascinated with the Incas’ use of khipu (or quipu), “which are long strands of knotted strings, and those who were the accountants and understood the meaning of these knots could reckon by them expenditures or other things that had taken place many years before.” Like other Europeans, Cieza de Leon was at first suspicious about the claims of those who read the khipus. But then he traveled to the province of Juaja, where he met a CACiqUE named Huacarapora who “sent his servants to fetch the khipus, and as this man is of goodly understanding and reason, for all he is an Indian, he readily satisfied my request.” Significantly, the Peruvians used the khipus to keep track of what Spanish CONQUiSTADORes stole from them when they pillaged various areas. After the invaders had finished their plundering, Cieza de Leon claimed that “the chieftains came together with the keepers of the quipus, and if one had expended more than another, those who had given less made up the difference, so they were all on an equal footing.”

Cieza de Leon’s chronicle thus provided readers with a fair-minded assessment of Peruvian society and also took note of the sufferings of the Incas and others as a result of the conquest. In this sense his book was an Iberian counterpart to the remarkable later text of Felipe Guaman Poma DE Ayala, whose early 17th-century account was an indigenous report about the legacy of the Spanish incursion.

Further reading: Pietro de Cieza de Leon, The Discovery and Conquest of Peru: Chronicles of the New World Encounter, ed. and trans. Alexandra Parma Cook and Noble David Cook (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press,

1998);--, The Incas, ed. and trans. Harriet de Onis

(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959).